Jerusalem - US President Barack Obama's special Mideast envoy met Friday morning with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as part of a US effort to bring Israelis and Palestinians close enough together to revive peace talks still this fall. George Mitchell was due to travel to the nearby West Bank city of Ramallah following his parley with Netanyahu, for talks with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in the evening.
"We are going to continue with our efforts to achieve an early relaunch of negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians," he told reporters before a private meeting with Israeli President Shimon Peres in Jerusalem, opening his latest round of talks.
Israeli-Palestinian peace talks were broken off late last year, after centrist former premier Ehud Olmert resigned to fight corruption allegations, sending Israel into early elections that saw the hardline Netanyahu return to power after 10 years.
The Palestinians are demanding that negotiations do not restart from scratch and have also made a complete freeze of Israeli construction in the occupied West Bank a condition for reviving the talks.
Mitchell failed during his last visit to the region in September to seal a deal on a settlement freeze. A three-way summit between Netanyahu, Abbas and Obama went ahead in New York without the US being able to announce a revival of the talks.
Obama announced instead that the sides would begin intense contacts in a bid to revive the talks later this autumn, possibly by late October.
